Solzhenitsyn on Stalin, to be honest. _The First Circle_ is fiction, but I find it hard to imagine that he would have described Stalin as not caring about burglars unless that could be imagined of him...

Solzhenitsyn in general gives a sense that the USSR wanted to keep things more or less held together, but wasn't that concerned about people who fell between the cracks.

If you equate Stalin with "the USSR", you're wilfully excluding about 40 years of additional history--history that was very, very different after 1953, and certainly is not captured in gulag literature.

What do you know about crime in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years? (A whopping 29 years combined.)